The Cormorant helicopter is shown landed in a field next to the wooded area where a Piper Comanche plane crashed Monday.Vancouver Sun
/ RCAF photo handout

One person has died and three are critically injured after a plane crashed 30 kilometres west of Kelowna near Peachland, emergency services officials said.The Ambulance Service dispatched three ground ambulances and a helicopter after receiving a call at 5:25 p.m. reporting a downed Piper P30 off of Highway 97C with four people on board.Screegrab
/ Wikipedia

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When one of Dallas Smith’s best friends wed last year, he flew home from Europe and surprised his tight-knit group of friends.

“Those guys — Dallas’ group of friends, they are so amazing. Dallas would have done anything for them. They have been friends since they were children,” said Sarah Burtnyk, 27.

“Do you know how rare and special that is?”

Burtnyk was speaking on behalf of her boyfriend Joel Antifaev, one of Smith’s best friends who was too distraught by the tragedy to speak.

Smith, 30, was killed on Monday when a small plane he was travelling in crashed in a wooded area near Peachland. Three other people survived, but are in hospital in critical condition.

A traveler and outdoor enthusiast, Smith was the kind of guy who “was all about living life,” said Burtnyk. On his Facebook page, Smith had posted his favourite quote: Everyone dies, not everyone lives.

According to his friends, he lived large and knew how to have grand adventures. Last February, he flew home from a year-long trek around Europe as a surprise to attend the wedding of the first set of his friends to tie the knot.

In July, to celebrate his 30th birthday, he organized a big camping trip to Harrison for all of his friends.

“That was Dallas. He always wanted to make it special for everyone. I am glad now that everyone showed up,” said Burtnyk.

Antifaev, his girlfriend said, will remember his lifelong friend as a happy, “just truly amazing” person who loved his mother more than anything. Smith looked up to his mother and described her as his hero.

Meanwhile, Bill Yearwood, a spokesman for the Transportation Safety Board, said investigators planned to remove the wreckage from the site Wednesday.

An initial probe has found that the plane had plenty of fuel when it crashed on Monday afternoon. Yearwood said that they also now know that the plane was travelling away from a clearing. There had been some speculation that the pilot was attempting to land the plane when it crashed on a hazy, hot afternoon in the Okanagan.

“The aircraft was travelling away from the clearing when it struck the tree,” he said.

Yearwood said Wednesday morning that all three of the survivors, including one woman who was found conscious by rescue crews, are all in critical condition in hospitals in Kelowna and Kamloops and Vancouver. Investigators have not yet been able to interview the survivors because they are not doing well, Yearwood said.

A fourth person, 30-year-old Vancouver resident Dallas Smith was killed in the crash. Yearwood also confirmed that Smith was not the pilot.

One of the woman in critical condition was transferred by Air Ambulance to Vancouver General Hospital, but Yearwood was unable to confirm reports it was Smith’s girlfriend.

On Monday afternoon, Warrant Officer Dan Lamoureux had just parachuted 750 metres out of a search-and-rescue plane and was searching the Okanagan forest for plane-crash survivors when he heard a faint response to his calls.

“And, oh my God, I couldn’t believe I heard a response from a female voice.”

He and another search-and-rescue technician soon reached the source — a woman who was sitting up and able to talk. With her were two people who were unconscious. Smith was already dead.

On the forest floor was the wreckage of a small plane, a tangled mess of metal in a patch of broken trees Lamoureux had spotted from the sky. Its wings were broken off and the fuselage was no longer in one piece, he said.

The twin-engined Piper PA-30 had gone down hours earlier. Lamoureux was on a return flight to the 19 Wing Comox air force base on Vancouver Island after a training mission Monday afternoon when a WestJet airliner reported picking up an emergency locator beacon around 3:15 p.m.

(The transmitter, or distress radio beacon, is required by law and activates on impact.)

It took the crew of Lamoureux’s Buffalo aircraft almost two hours to locate the wreckage in an area near Peachland on the west side of Okanagan Lake.

Firefighters, police and paramedics arrived at the scene near Brenda Mines off Highway 97C around 5 p.m. Dispatched by air traffic controllers at Victoria’s joint rescue coordination centre, an air ambulance and a military Cormorant helicopter landed in an open field around 7 p.m.

As the firefighters and search-and-rescue technicians removed the survivors, the air ambulance took two of them to Kelowna General Hospital in separate trips. One was later transferred to Vancouver. The third survivor was airlifted in the Cormorant to a hospital in Kamloops.

“Everything worked like clockwork,” said Lamoureux.

The Transportation Safety Board sent two investigators to the scene to examine the aircraft before trying to speak with survivors.

Yearwood also said the safety board investigation will try to determine why the pilot flew further north than the intended route, which was from Penticton directly west to Princeton and then on to Boundary Bay in Metro Vancouver.

“The wreckage is somewhat off that direct course,” Yearwood said.

“We don’t know that this was an attempt at emergency landing, we are just starting the investigation and we haven’t had an opportunity to hear from the pilot or passengers whether they were dealing with a problem or not.

“Certainly we have to apply the weather conditions at the time to the aircraft performance and determine whether it plays a big factor.”

He said hot air can affect an aircraft’s ability to climb over a mountain, but pilots have charts to help calculate whether the temperature and altitude will negatively affect a plane’s handling.

The weather in the area was above 30 degrees on Monday, according to Environment Canada.

Monday’s crash occurred in the same area that a de Havilland Beaver crashed in a ball of flame in May, killing all three aboard. At the time, witnesses said that aircraft appeared to be trying to gain altitude but could not climb quickly enough to avoid the steep terrain.

Yearwood said no parallels can be drawn between the two crashes until both investigations are finished.

Two years ago, another crash involving a Piper Comanche that departed from Penticton killed four people. That plane, a single-engine aircraft, crashed in August of 2010 near Apex Mountain.

The Transportation Safety Board didn’t conduct a full investigation of that crash, but a coroner’s report concluded a combination of the plane’s weight and hot, thin air likely contributed.

With files from Canadian Press

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